Saw this, thought it was quite interesting, IMHO Padfields 40yo book on guns at sea, and its chapter on the development of fire control from pre dreadnought times has not yet been surpassed, at least a s a readable introduction to the topic.

He loves the book, in comparison to many of the readers here, who were quite dissapointed in Friedmans treatment of a number of issues, not the least the Brooks Sumida issues.

It's unfortunate, as I think Padfield missed his chance to discuss fire control and has not undertaken a command of the topic in the ensuing years.

I enjoyed Padfield's book, and refer to it on occasion, but its primary value to me was a cursory discussion of German fire control methods and a single image of their dumaresq (without reference of any type, IIRC).

Why there are so many books with information on muzzle velocities and so few on where those muzzles would be directed and why?

Tony, I feel you. Thanks to your research I know pretty well how the British controlled their guns, and I've got a good idea as to how the US Navy did it, but what about the French, Germans, Austrians, etc.?_________________John H. Dulaney

For the Germans, much of the accessible data is from the few accounts (whose details are regarded as digression within the scope of the works) by Georg von Hase, gunnery officer of Derfflinger IIRC.

For instance, it is fairly well known that the Germans came to rely heavily on a Mittlungs Aparat (sp?), which allowed a semi-automated averaging of range cuts as they came in to derive a "mean range of the moment". No real detail on this is known to survive that I am aware of except that it allowed an operator to switch out the input of RFs who were deemed out of the norm.

While an overall command of the details of the British Dreyer tables and their use within the ships seem to mystify 99.9% of reasonably competent fans of this history (and all but one of its published authors), the data is fairly freely available and most of its content doesn't require much out-of-scope knowledge. What I would put in the latter segment (the truly hard to divine background facts) are things as obscure as the nonexistence of the best-described Dreyer tables (those in the 1918 handbook, with their "standard bearing plots") at any point in the war.

I think the general belief is that the Germans destroyed most of their materials to keep the enemy from having it when the Armistice was signed.

That is not a certainty, but you can appreciate the degree to which language differences and subsequent hostilities and Soviet occupation and alignment really made it a blizzard of mystery.

If ever you go to the UK, it would be great to coordinate photo-taking methods of books. Simon has done a bit, as has Rob Brassington (whose methods are world-class), as have I. The things to keep in mind (which I have often failed at) are:

1. Bring a lot of analgesics -- your back will ache from repetitive crouching and page-turning

2. know how to use your camera

3. have a small transparent metric ruler to lay at the edge of sheets bearing scale drawings

4. it pays to have a tripod and a small photo stage. Rob has these and the results are well beyond even my best hand-done shots

However, I can bring plenty of lights, and I would get a white sheet in-country to help diffuse the light. It can't be that much harder than shooting photos of N scale model trains (the above flat car is slightly less than an inch long)._________________John H. Dulaney

It was Jon Sumida who first suggested that the Royal Navy before the first world war conceived a tactic designed to lure the German High Seas Fleet into its own preferred medium-to-short range, there to annihilate it; Friedman's work virtually confirms this ground-breaking thesis ...

I always thought Holy Grail was easily the best of the Python films, special though the following two were.

Quote:

S: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
H: Bloody peasant!
S: Oh, what a give-away. Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That's
what I'm on about. Did you see him repressing me? You saw it, didn't you?